Month: January 2019

As the White House continues negotiations with Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill, there has been one immigration deal that has yet to die: Amnesty first, a border wall last.

The billionaire class and donors of the GOP and Democrat political establishments have been able to keep their dream of an amnesty for more than a million illegal aliens enrolled and eligible for President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program alive.

Aside from increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) enforcement and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ legal reforms, the Trump administration has yet to deliver on some of the key promises of his campaign, including a wall along the southern border, mandatory E-Verify, an executive order to end birthright citizenship, and a reduction of legal immigration levels to raise the wages of America’s working and middle-class.

And while the federal government remains shut down as Republicans and Democrats have failed to reach a deal to fund Trump’s proposed border wall, the billionaire class’s hope for an immediate DACA amnesty and promises of a wall down the road remain in the discussion.

Some in Trump’s base — those whose support is contingent on whether his economic nationalist immigration platform is executed — say the deal would be the final nail in the coffin and nearly solidify his re-election loss in 2020.

“Any support of DACA amnesty, before, after or during construction of a border wall is a betrayal to his campaign promises,” ALIPAC President and activist William Gheen told Breitbart News.

Gheen’s organization is a network of Americans who congregate online and in discussion boards to voice their opposition to amnesty for illegal aliens. Such a deal would “destroy all walls and borders,” Gheen said, mentioning how the American electorate would likely be transformed and further tilted to favor Democrats should there be a mass legalization of illegal aliens.

“I feel quite certain that Trump would have never been elected president if he was talking about negotiating an amnesty for a border wall,” Gheen said.

For Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, whom conservatives have pushed to become the next Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, a DACA amnesty before a border wall is built and legal immigration levels are reduced is merely inviting more illegal immigration.

“Not only would it be detrimental, it would be an incredibly bad deal,” Kobach told Breitbart News Sunday on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125 this weekend. “Any amnesty, whether it’s a DACA amnesty or some other amnesty, will have incredibly negative consequences for the country.”

Kris Kobach speaks at a rally with President Donald Trump at the Kansas Expocentre on October 6, 2018, in Topeka, Kansas. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

“First of all, it will trigger more illegal immigration just like the 1986 amnesty triggered the most massive wave of illegal immigration in our history because more illegal aliens to either fraudulently claim they are eligible for the amnesty that is being drafted,” Kobach noted. “Or to come in and just wait for the next amnesty.”

Indeed, when President Ronald Reagan signed off on the 1986 amnesty, not only was the promise of a secure border never secured, but illegal immigration continued surging at the southern border.

Between 1987 and 2000, the southern border was seeing an annual flow of about 1.3 million illegal aliens every year. Legal immigration levels, likewise, skyrocketed. In 1987, the U.S. admitted about 600,000 legal immigrants. By 1991, the number of legal immigrants admitted to the country had spiked to almost two million in a single year.

“Every time Congress starts talking about an amnesty, we see a surge at the border,” Kobach said. “And so to grant amnesty has all of these negative consequences.”

“All you’d end up doing is basically stimulating another wave of illegal immigration and manage to complete a small fraction of the total wall,” Kobach said.

New York Times best-selling author and conservative populist columnist Ann Coulter has been so frustrated with the lack of progress on the border wall that she regularly posts online a “border wall construction update.”

“Today’s BORDER WALL CONSTRUCTION UPDATE: Miles completed yesterday–Zero; Miles completed since Inauguration–Zero,” Coulter writes on a weekly basis. “NEXT UPDATE TOMORROW.”

Even for Coulter, though, the longing for a border wall must not come at the expense of an amnesty first, granting immediate benefits for illegal aliens while leaving Americans left hoping they see less illegal immigration in the future.

“Millions of voters not only won’t vote for [Donald Trump] again, but will never vote Republican again if they pass this DACA amnesty,” Coulter wrote in 2017 on Twitter when the billionaires’ preferred DACA amnesty plan was being considered by House and Senate Republicans and Trump.

While the amnesty first, wall last deal would give Trump anywhere between $1.6 to $5 billion for his border wall, that money would not see the light of day for potentially years. Meanwhile, the amnesty component would begin instantly.

In terms of legal immigration, a DACA amnesty would implement a never-ending flow of foreign relatives to the DACA illegal aliens who can be readily sponsored for green cards through the process known as “chain migration.”

Based on Princeton University research, the country could see surges of chain migration to nine million solely due to the amnesty as every newly naturalized Mexican immigrant brings about six foreign relatives with them to the U.S.

While immigration increases, the border wall would continue to be a promise and could even be held up by federal judges, a future Congress, or another DHS secretary.

Then there’s the national security aspect.

Angel Mom Mary Ann Mendoza campaigned for Trump in 2016. She found support from him following years of being ignored by elected Republicans and Democrats after her son, 32-year-old police officer Brandon Mendoza, was killed by a drunk illegal alien who was driving the wrong way down a highway in Mesa, Arizona.

For Mendoza — who has now dedicated her life to stopping illegal immigration, co-founding AngelFamilies.org — the wall is personal.

“I’ve seen government workers say they are working without pay because of the shut down right now. I would go without pay indefinitely if it meant having my son back in my life,” Mendoza told Breitbart News.

Mary Ann Mendoza poses for a photograph while holding a framed picture of herself and her son, Brandon Mendoza, on Thursday, March 2, 2017, at her home in Mesa, Ariz. Mendoza’s son, a Mesa police officer, was killed on May 12, 2014, in a head-on collision with a man who authorities say was intoxicated and an immigrant in the country illegally. Both Brandon Mendoza and the other diver were killed in the crash. (AP Photo/Brian Skoloff)

Mendoza considers even the consideration of an amnesty for illegal aliens before a border wall is constructed a “slap in the face” to the thousands of Angel Families who have lost children to illegal immigration.

“It would be a real slap in our faces if this is considered,” Mendoza said. “A lot of us have stopped our everyday life to fight this fight to try and get the word out about illegal immigration.”

Despite strong opposition from Trump’s base, the DACA amnesty first, border wall last deal has continued to come up in discussions at the White House’s negotiations with Republicans and Democrats.

Taking such a route, with all of its consequences for American citizens, would be juxtaposed against a number of recent high-profile murders allegedly committed by illegal aliens. Mollie Tibbetts, police officer Ron Singh, and 22-year-old Pierce Corcoran are just a few of the Americans whom prosecutors say have lost their lives at the hands of illegal aliens.

“Put the wall up and then we’ll talk about the people who are here,” Mendoza said. “It needs to be flipped. Protection of the American people must be first and foremost in our politicians’ minds.”

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) told Breitbart News exclusively on Tuesday that he will introduce legislation on Tuesday entitled, “No Budget, No Pay,” which would block any lawmaker from receiving a paycheck if Congress does not pass a budget.

Braun, along with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), will introduce the No Budget, No Pay legislation, which stipulates that members must pass all budget resolutions and appropriation bills by the start of the fiscal year, October 1, or else they will not receive any pay.

Sen. Braun, who also called for securing the border now in an interview with Breitbart News, said on Monday that the legislation will force Congress to pass a budget, rather than passing a continuing resolution or an omnibus bill at the last minute.

The Hoosier Republican said, “When I decided to run, I also decided to sign the term limits bill. I signed a pledge as a senator, and I’ll be forthright here: we don’t send the cream of the crop to D.C., and I said that many times and that’s because most people that have really done something in the real world are not going to give up that to build a career in politics. I think that if you take the money out of it, you certainly get a better average individual coming here in Congress and certainly here in the Senate if you had term limits.”

“No budget, no pay is simply something we do to put some teeth into the fact that this has become a circus annually. You’d be laughed out of Indiana if this was anything close to how we do things there,” Braun continued. “When you come from a place as an entrepreneur, as a business guy you be laughed at if or you would be run of out of business through the harsh rules for the marketplace if you ran a business, a school board, or a state legislature like you do here. You need to be collectively accountable, and here with one year’s warning, get a budget here, you should be forced to do so and go where it really hurts and do not receive a paycheck.”

Sen. Braun told Breitbart News that reforming Congress’s budget process and tackling America’s national debt will be one of his top priorities.

Braun said that his legislation could encourage Congress to help resolve America’s debt crisis.

The Indiana senator said resolving the debt crisis “would have to be through some sort of legislation or some sort of straightjacket that’s put on the process so it can’t keep maneuvering its way out of it.”

President Donald Trump will deliver his first address from the Oval Office on Tuesday evening at 9 p.m. ET. He will explain why the country needs a physical barrier at the U.S-Mexico border, and why he is refusing to consider bills to end the partial federal government shutdown unless they provide the funding he is seeking.

Breitbart News readers and listeners have been looking forward to such an address for weeks.

Here are seven things Trump must say.

1. The border issue is about national security, the first priority of government. Americans are used to fights over immigration policy. This is different. The nation faces a crisis at its southern border. The drug cartels are taking advantage of our open border to smuggle drugs, weapons, and people. They are also waging a bloody civil war that bleeds over into our country. Everything else the government does is secondary to protecting the country. There is literally no point to opening the government until politicians are prepared to take care of its first priority. 

2. The first victims of the Mexican cartels are the migrants and the countries from which they come. Cartels are brutal. They slaughter innocent civilians. They rape the women and girls they are trafficking to criminals in the U.S. The drugs they sneak into the U.S. kill thousands of Americans each year. And the developing countries that migrants leave behind become poorer. Democrats who, like Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), say “[t]here is no national emergency on our southern border,” are encouraging the cartels. There is nothing humane about an open border.

3. The border crisis has nothing to do with legal immigration, which we embrace. Corporal Ronil Singh, a Newman, California police officer — and legal immigrant — was murdered the day after Christmas by an alleged illegal alien. Many Americans want less immigration — a debate for another day. Regardless, Americans respect legal immigrants. We should reform our immigration laws, including those that allow foreigners to claim amnesty as soon as they touch American soil. Corporal Singh gave his life to defend the rule of law. That is what is at stake.

4. Illegal immigration hurts all Americans, but especially legal immigrants, minorities, and the poor. With better border enforcement, black and Hispanic unemployment is the lowest ever, and wages are rising for all Americans. Those gains are threatened by illegal aliens who compete with U.S. citizens and legal immigrants for jobs. Illegal immigration also hurts public health care and education, as illegal aliens place additional burdens on services that are already struggling. We can have a generous welfare state, or open borders, but not both.

5. Democrats are hypocrites. Many Democrats — including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) — have voted for a barrier at the border in the past. Border walls, and fences, are not “immoral,” as Speaker Nancy Pelosi keeps saying. Nor are they racist. They work — which is why the European Union builds them, why our ally Israel builds them, and why even developing countries in Africa build them. The main reason Democrats oppose a barrier at the border is because they don’t want President Trump to have a political win. Stop making this personal.

6. We have to act now because both parties failed in the past. Many Democrats want open borders because they see illegal aliens as future voters. Many donor-class Republicans have tolerated illegal immigration because of business demand for cheap labor. That is why both parties have overlooked the laws they voted to pass, and ignored the wishes of the American people. President Barack Obama told Congress in 2011: “I strongly believe that we should take on, once and for all, the issue of illegal immigration.” They did nothing. We can no longer wait.

7. Let the engineers design a barrier that works. The wall should not be a Democratic or Republican issue. Nor should it be a budget issue: Democrats are fighting over a mere $5 billion, when their own budget bill spends tens of billions more in excess of White House requests on other items, including foreign aid. The wall — or fence — is little more than an engineering problem. We should let experts make their recommendations about what kind of physical barriers to build at each point along the border. Let the engineers do their job — and let’s put America first.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

 

President Donald Trump will speak directly to the nation on Tuesday evening as a government shutdown enters its third week, and Democrats on Capitol Hill continue to refuse to fund border security and a border wall that Trump promised the American people.

Trump’s planned Oval Office address, which will be nationally televised on every major network and is expected to last approximately eight minutes, raises the stakes of this current political impasse to one of the biggest moments of Trump’s presidency.

The government shut down in late 2018, before Christmas, when Senate Democrats refused to back a House-passed government funding bill that would have provided more than $5 billion in funding for the wall. The House had passed the measure as one of its last acts at the end of eight years of GOP control of the lower chamber of Congress, but the Senate could not pass it because Senate Democrats lined up to prevent it from reaching the necessary 60-vote threshold.

The impasse led to a funding lapse, causing a partial government shutdown that has seen hundreds of thousands of federal workers furloughed and several departments and agencies of the federal government partially closed except for essential services.

The shutdown lingered through the Christmas and New Years holidays into 2019. Then, on Jan. 3, at the beginning of this year, the Democrats took over the House of Representatives with the majority they won in November’s midterm elections.

When Democrats took over, they passed funding measures without border wall money, but the White House – through the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) – has threatened to veto those. The Senate, meanwhile, which remains under GOP control, has per Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to take up any legislation that the president will not support–and the president is standing by his demand for border wall funding.

Trump will take to the airwaves at 9:00 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday evening, when he will make what White House officials say will be an approximately eight-minute-long address directly to the American people as the commander-in-chief, arguing that there is a national emergency and crisis that demands a solution including a wall or barrier along the U.S. border with Mexico.

Previously, support for a barrier along the border was not something that was controversial or partisan–Democrats backed, during the George W. Bush administration, the Secure Fence Act en masse. Democrats have also previously said they support securing the border, but many of them will not explain how they intend to do so without a barrier.

Trump’s crusade for a wall along the border began in the early days of his campaign for the White House, which he launched from Trump Tower in New York City in the summer of 2015. It became the central theme of his campaign for the presidency, and crowds at his rallies would chant “build the wall!” repeatedly in sold-out venues across the country.

In an Oval Office interview with Breitbart News at the beginning of his presidency, President Trump explained the importance of a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico in order to prevent drugs and crime from flowing freely across the barrier-less border, as they do now.

“We’re going to have a wall,” Trump told Breitbart News. “The wall is ahead of schedule. We’re going to have a wall and it will be a great wall and it will stop the drugs from pouring in and destroying our youth. And it will stop people from coming in that aren’t allowed to come in.”

Trump has maintained throughout his presidency his commitment to building the wall, and he has battled with Democrats hellbent on opposing it every step of the way. Three weeks into the shutdown, Trump now takes his most dramatic step in the push for the wall: an Oval Office address, televised directly to the American people.

The power of the backdrop of the Oval Office, when used effectively, has helped presidents in the modern era deliver major speeches, such as when Ronald Reagan soothed the nation after the Challenger crash or when John F. Kennedy delivered news of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the country.

The Oval Office is viewed as the power center of the world, as it is where U.S. presidents make decisions, and it is a physical representation of the office they hold. One of the key powers of a president is that of what is called the bully pulpit, something that allows a president through actions like this and other types of speeches and communications to draw attention to things the president wants the country and the world to focus on.

An Oval Office address is the most extreme and intensified version of the use of the bully pulpit power and aims at swaying public opinion in the president’s direction and rallying the nation together behind a unified cause.

Trump taking this drastic step also means he’s betting it all on the wall. To win, he has to come out the other end of a divided Washington with a border wall in tow–or having given an Oval Office address and then failing would mark a significant defeat for a president.

The president has said he is willing to drag this fight out for months or even years if necessary to get the border wall from the Democrats on Capitol Hill. The Democrats say they are not willing to give him the wall.

It is unclear where this battle goes from here, but the president is scheduled to tour the U.S. border with Mexico on Thursday–just two days after he delivers this historic address from the Oval Office.

For the life of me, I struggle to understand some of the vitriol and hatred directed at Fox News.

It’s one thing to disagree with the political views of the network’s stars. America is a free country and people can identify with whatever end of the political spectrum they’d like to.

But how can you hate Fox News when it does such good for people like the grieving window of Newman, California, Police Cpl. Ronil Singh?

Tragically, Singh was shot and killed early on Dec. 26, allegedly by an alleged illegal immigrant with multiple DUIs and suspected gang ties, according to Fox News.

He is survived by his widow, Anamika Chand-Singh, and the couple’s 5-month-old son.

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It’s a horrific story in and of itself, but it’s also a stark reminder of why President Donald Trump has made such a big point about improving border security.

In an even crueler twist, Singh was himself a legal immigrant — from the island nation of Fiji. It’s the worst imaginable juxtaposition for any leftist or Democrats who would dare to advocate for open borders.

And his death is a cause for mourning across the country.

Karen & I send our heartfelt condolences to Officer Ronil Singh’s family, friends, and the entire law enforcement community of Newman, CA. We will never forget Officer Singh’s selfless service & bravery. https://t.co/hojYeDlBvC

— Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) January 6, 2019

That being said, Fox News did its best to give this horrific story as happy ending as possible.

The most-watched cable news network came out and helped push its viewers to help support Singh’s widow through the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers foundation.

It’s a demonstrably good charity that aims to “honor our military and first responders who continue to make the supreme sacrifice of life and limb for our country.”

Stephen Siller was a firefighter “who laid down his life to save others on September 11, 2001.”

Fox News helped reach the foundation’s goal of $350,000 to help pay off the mortgange for Mika Singh’s mortgage.

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“It was right here on ‘Fox & Friends’ that the Tunnel to Towers Foundation pledged to raise $300,000 to help pay off the Singh’s family’s mortgage,” co-host Brian Kilmeade explained.

“Fox & Friends” then brought on Frank Siller, CEO of the Tunnel to Towers foundation, to share the incredible news.

“Well, I’m very proud to announce, with the help of ‘Fox & Friends’ viewers and most certainly you guys here, that we not only reached the $300,000 to pay off the mortgage, because of the generosity of Americans that we went over that – we were able to give them an extra $50,000 for educational (needs) for the 5-month-old and it goes even beyond that,” Siller explained.

“Mika Singh, the widow, wanted to pass on her thanks to ‘Fox & Friends,’ to you personally, and to the viewers because they know without your help that this couldn’t happen,” Siller added. “She expressed such relief that she’s never going to have to worry about this mortgage again and that there’s other money to help her son.”

This is something that anyone, regardless of political affiliation should be able to commend. Congrats to Fox News for this awesome deed.

We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.

“TV exec texts: ‘He calls us fake news all the time, but needs access to airwaves… If we give him the time, he’ll deliver a fact-free screed without rebuttal. And if we don’t give him the time, he’ll call every network partisan. So we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t,’” Stelter posted.

TV exec texts: “He calls us fake news all the time, but needs access to airwaves… If we give him the time, he’ll deliver a fact-free screed without rebuttal. And if we don’t give him the time, he’ll call every network partisan. So we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.”

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 7, 2019

Last week, Stelter used his newsletter to promote the idea of not airing presidential events live because of Trump’s “lies.”

Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, among others, pointed out that when former president Obama gave an address on immigration in 2014, networks did not run it because it was thought of as too political.

Of note: All four networks refused Obama’s request to air a prime-time address on proposed executive actions related to immigration in 2014; it just ran on cable. https://t.co/Vcm5IwcPZT

— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) January 7, 2019

Others called for outright censorship, with Vox Media’s Matt Yglesias saying, “Don’t give Trump free airtime to lie about the shutdown with no interruptions, context, or fact-checking.”

Don’t give Trump free airtime to lie about the shutdown with no interruptions, context, or fact-checking.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) January 7, 2019

Pundits, commentators, penny-ante prognosticators all talk with certainty about the mixture of voters who sent Donald J. Trump, a gaudy real-estate developer, to the White House.  Yet most can’t pinpoint who composed this group of Americans who were willing to roll the dice on an unknown compared to someone as politically familiar – too familiar, even – as Hillary Clinton.

Trump voters are described in various amorphous terms, not all of which are friendly: working class, nationalist, rural, populist, provincial, anti-globalist, immigration skeptics, racist dissidents.  It’s also unclear what kind of president Trump will end up being.  Will he be, in the parlance of political scientist Stephen Skowronek, reconstructive in the vein of Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, permanently reforming his party?  Or will Trump be merely disjunctive, signaling the end of the last regime but failing to unite the disparate strands of interests that put him in office?

It’s hard to say.  Trump’s governing style lacks predictability.  That’s because his philosophical core is, at best, inchoate.  Trump himself may not fully comprehend the larger picture formed by his beliefs – an attribute not unfamiliar to most Americans.

A cottage industry has formed around explaining what Trumpism is and isn’t.  But many of these tracts, which are sold for inflated prices at airport bookstores, focus on the man, not what he represents compared to the current political order.

Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony just took a big intellectual leap forward in developing a social system close to what Trump voters may be seeking.  In the current state of things, both Democrat and Republican, and their party congeners – greenie, libertarian, democratic socialist – hold fast to the principles of liberalism.  And by liberalism, I don’t mean generic Democratic policies.  In this case, it’s liberalism qua liberalism – individual equality, consensual exchange, the supremacy of reason.

The American system of government was established largely along these principles, which are based on the thinking of philosophers like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes.  Most modern politicians still govern along liberal lines.  Democrats relentlessly push for the equality of newly discovered sexual and racial classifications.  Republicans embrace the freedom of the marketplace, within our borders and out.

The one prominent exception is Trump, who has never been a doctrinaire Republican, nor a typical Democrat despite being registered as one for years. He refers to himself as a “nationalist,” despite the term’s open-ended implications.  Hazony has just written a well received book on the positive attributes of nationalism, The Virtue of Nationalism.  But it’s his recent essay in First Things outlining the alternative to liberalism that paves the way for new thinking on our old system of government.

Titled “Conservative Democracy,” Hazony picks up where Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen left off with last year’s “Why Liberalism Failed,” and sketches out what a more conservative approach to liberal democracy can look like.  Hazony right away dispenses with the old canard that fascism and Marxism are liberalism’s only replacements.  While recognizing the indisputable benefits of liberalism – no one can seriously claim market capitalism hasn’t been a boon for human living standards.  Hello, modern dentistry! – Hazony homes in on its failures: the inability to keep families intact and religion a crucial aspect of our collective lives.

He writes:

The most significant institutions that have characterized America and Britain for the last five centuries, giving these countries their internal ­coherence and stability – the Bible, public religion, the independent national state, and the traditional family – are not merely under assault.  They have been, at least since World War II, in precipitous ­decline.

Hazony points out a glaring omission that even right-leaning defenders of liberalism are guilty of: family stability, faith, and patriotic loyalty are not intrinsic characteristics of liberalism.  The latter doesn’t need the former to exist – indeed, their absence is increasingly the national norm.  Skyrocketing out-of-wedlock birth rates, declining church attendance, a withering of our reverence for history and tradition.  These have been liberalism’s fruits.

Hazony envisions a new regimen, one that emphasizes national continuity and historical faith while maintaining the better aspects of liberalism, including limited government and individual liberty.  A conservative system, he stipulates, would emphasize five main points: historical empiricism, nationalism, religion, limited executive power, and individual freedoms.

Where liberalism fails, Hazony contends, is in its fatal conceit, to borrow a term from one of the ideology’s most famous exponents.  ”In their campaign for universal ‘liberal democracy,’ liberals have thus confused certain historical-­empirical principles of the traditional Anglo-American constitution,” he writes, “for universal truths that are equally accessible to all human beings, regardless of historical or cultural circumstances.”

Hazony’s “conservative democracy” is, in short, a return to particularity.  Like all social systems, it’s imperfect and in need of refinement.  But it has potential, not just to supplant liberalism, but to improve it.

The desire for some aspects of conservative democracy was apparent in Trump’s election.  The hollowing out of our manufacturing base through liberalism’s championing of free trade, the opioid epidemic that stems from a lack of transcendent meaning inculcated through churching, the ever upward tick of the divorce rate among older Americans – these factors boosted the poignancy of Trump’s nostalgia-heavy campaign message.

So what’s next? Books and polemics are one way of getting the message out that untrammeled liberalism is behind many of our woes.  Hazony has done a valuable service adumbrating an alternative to liberalism that isn’t liquidating the kulaks.  But he can’t popularize it on his own.

Coincidentally enough, an unexpected voice has distilled some of the more straightforward aspects of conservative democracy and broadcasted them to a wide audience.  Fox News host Tucker Carlson began the year with a ripping monologue, taking American elites to task for living bourgeois lifestyles but not passing those values down the social ladder.  He describes members of the “educated upper-middle classes” as “functionally libertarian” in lifestyle – that is, liberal.  This hands-off approach has given way to a raft of fatherless homes and hopeless drug addiction cases we see everywhere outside high-income ZIP codes.

Carlson, like sociologist Charles Murray before him, wants an elite class better attuned to the needs of the working and middle class.  Hazony has developed an intellectual framework to conserve the best of liberalism while shoring up its shortcomings.  Trump won a presidential election based on the notion that our nation is not as cohesive as it once was.

This constellation of doubt in the status quo isn’t a mistake.  Liberalism is due for a rethinking.  At the very least, the motivating forces that elected Trump and Hazony’s proposition gives us something more to think about in the highly circumscribed arena of political ideas.

Pundits, commentators, penny-ante prognosticators all talk with certainty about the mixture of voters who sent Donald J. Trump, a gaudy real-estate developer, to the White House.  Yet most can’t pinpoint who composed this group of Americans who were willing to roll the dice on an unknown compared to someone as politically familiar – too familiar, even – as Hillary Clinton.

Trump voters are described in various amorphous terms, not all of which are friendly: working class, nationalist, rural, populist, provincial, anti-globalist, immigration skeptics, racist dissidents.  It’s also unclear what kind of president Trump will end up being.  Will he be, in the parlance of political scientist Stephen Skowronek, reconstructive in the vein of Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, permanently reforming his party?  Or will Trump be merely disjunctive, signaling the end of the last regime but failing to unite the disparate strands of interests that put him in office?

It’s hard to say.  Trump’s governing style lacks predictability.  That’s because his philosophical core is, at best, inchoate.  Trump himself may not fully comprehend the larger picture formed by his beliefs – an attribute not unfamiliar to most Americans.

A cottage industry has formed around explaining what Trumpism is and isn’t.  But many of these tracts, which are sold for inflated prices at airport bookstores, focus on the man, not what he represents compared to the current political order.

Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony just took a big intellectual leap forward in developing a social system close to what Trump voters may be seeking.  In the current state of things, both Democrat and Republican, and their party congeners – greenie, libertarian, democratic socialist – hold fast to the principles of liberalism.  And by liberalism, I don’t mean generic Democratic policies.  In this case, it’s liberalism qua liberalism – individual equality, consensual exchange, the supremacy of reason.

The American system of government was established largely along these principles, which are based on the thinking of philosophers like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes.  Most modern politicians still govern along liberal lines.  Democrats relentlessly push for the equality of newly discovered sexual and racial classifications.  Republicans embrace the freedom of the marketplace, within our borders and out.

The one prominent exception is Trump, who has never been a doctrinaire Republican, nor a typical Democrat despite being registered as one for years. He refers to himself as a “nationalist,” despite the term’s open-ended implications.  Hazony has just written a well received book on the positive attributes of nationalism, The Virtue of Nationalism.  But it’s his recent essay in First Things outlining the alternative to liberalism that paves the way for new thinking on our old system of government.

Titled “Conservative Democracy,” Hazony picks up where Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen left off with last year’s “Why Liberalism Failed,” and sketches out what a more conservative approach to liberal democracy can look like.  Hazony right away dispenses with the old canard that fascism and Marxism are liberalism’s only replacements.  While recognizing the indisputable benefits of liberalism – no one can seriously claim market capitalism hasn’t been a boon for human living standards.  Hello, modern dentistry! – Hazony homes in on its failures: the inability to keep families intact and religion a crucial aspect of our collective lives.

He writes:

The most significant institutions that have characterized America and Britain for the last five centuries, giving these countries their internal ­coherence and stability – the Bible, public religion, the independent national state, and the traditional family – are not merely under assault.  They have been, at least since World War II, in precipitous ­decline.

Hazony points out a glaring omission that even right-leaning defenders of liberalism are guilty of: family stability, faith, and patriotic loyalty are not intrinsic characteristics of liberalism.  The latter doesn’t need the former to exist – indeed, their absence is increasingly the national norm.  Skyrocketing out-of-wedlock birth rates, declining church attendance, a withering of our reverence for history and tradition.  These have been liberalism’s fruits.

Hazony envisions a new regimen, one that emphasizes national continuity and historical faith while maintaining the better aspects of liberalism, including limited government and individual liberty.  A conservative system, he stipulates, would emphasize five main points: historical empiricism, nationalism, religion, limited executive power, and individual freedoms.

Where liberalism fails, Hazony contends, is in its fatal conceit, to borrow a term from one of the ideology’s most famous exponents.  ”In their campaign for universal ‘liberal democracy,’ liberals have thus confused certain historical-­empirical principles of the traditional Anglo-American constitution,” he writes, “for universal truths that are equally accessible to all human beings, regardless of historical or cultural circumstances.”

Hazony’s “conservative democracy” is, in short, a return to particularity.  Like all social systems, it’s imperfect and in need of refinement.  But it has potential, not just to supplant liberalism, but to improve it.

The desire for some aspects of conservative democracy was apparent in Trump’s election.  The hollowing out of our manufacturing base through liberalism’s championing of free trade, the opioid epidemic that stems from a lack of transcendent meaning inculcated through churching, the ever upward tick of the divorce rate among older Americans – these factors boosted the poignancy of Trump’s nostalgia-heavy campaign message.

So what’s next? Books and polemics are one way of getting the message out that untrammeled liberalism is behind many of our woes.  Hazony has done a valuable service adumbrating an alternative to liberalism that isn’t liquidating the kulaks.  But he can’t popularize it on his own.

Coincidentally enough, an unexpected voice has distilled some of the more straightforward aspects of conservative democracy and broadcasted them to a wide audience.  Fox News host Tucker Carlson began the year with a ripping monologue, taking American elites to task for living bourgeois lifestyles but not passing those values down the social ladder.  He describes members of the “educated upper-middle classes” as “functionally libertarian” in lifestyle – that is, liberal.  This hands-off approach has given way to a raft of fatherless homes and hopeless drug addiction cases we see everywhere outside high-income ZIP codes.

Carlson, like sociologist Charles Murray before him, wants an elite class better attuned to the needs of the working and middle class.  Hazony has developed an intellectual framework to conserve the best of liberalism while shoring up its shortcomings.  Trump won a presidential election based on the notion that our nation is not as cohesive as it once was.

This constellation of doubt in the status quo isn’t a mistake.  Liberalism is due for a rethinking.  At the very least, the motivating forces that elected Trump and Hazony’s proposition gives us something more to think about in the highly circumscribed arena of political ideas.